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Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Second Careers and Worlds of Woocraft

With the OOXML vs ODF bitter butter flames calming, in the carnage it is clear that neither of these standards or draft standards is a domain of innovation. They are the practice of post mortem diagnosis of a disease. The patient is dead but let's cut her open and figure out what killed her.

I don't care that much. Those are the same battles we had in the 90s.

But... now we will have tests for the statements of IBM and the rest of those who went on the rampage under the banners "Open Standards" and "One Standard Per Technology":

Will they join the W3DC and support open IP-unencumbered standards for 3D on the Web or will they back the plays of the server-farm companies who want to capture that flag with proprietary private standards and open source code?

Are their ethics as strong as their rhetoric or only as deep as their investments?

What is Palimpsano getting for his money, products or services to sell or the education of the next careers of his soon-to-be-former employees?

3D systems have been challenging our markup-centric assumptions for a decade and a half. There is an even older vector vs markup schism historically. The number of big companies that have recently announced virtual world initiatives is growing fast and picking up a lot of press. With that much noise, there is something going on.

But the point is we have an acceleration toward non-page-oriented hypermedia wrapper applications as the focus of innovation. Standards for high churn domains are hard to come by. There is a 3D vector standard for real time applications (X3D) that goes almost unnoticed as the server-farms worlds announce products and *standards initiatives*. It has become a cynical game of playing on personalities and pumped-up emnities to achieve ever more proprietary ownership of the web infrastructure.

In the 3D/VR BigServerFarmCo-op communities there is almost no understanding of what they are doing to their content builders and owners. They are like villages of the dammed possessed and purposeless except to self-preserve. Real standards? Not in their second careers or their worlds of woocraft. The BigCos are lining the 3D Web up as the push to finally capture the web flag. Not the topic here, but understand that these bitter butter battles do more to damage the consensus culture by trying to wipe out the other species than if they simply tolerated them and stayed focused on improving their own technology. It is hard to do.

I agree that none of the big players have pure motives. I don't expect them to. Over time I've come to see it almost like Henry Kissinger as a balance among kings and principalities where we try to squeeze out the best deal for the greatest number possible.

But very soon now, we will know if IBM and the rest are true supporters of open source, open standards, IP-free, or just more WooCrafters making career hay. This is the test of whether what the OOXML pundits said about them is true or not.